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The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.
KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto
Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.
KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto
Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the labourer.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto
The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.
KARL MARX, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto
Democracy is the road to socialism.
Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
KARL MARX, Criticism of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"
All great historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice ... the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
KARL MARX, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
I do not like money, money is the reason we fight.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Capital is money, capital is commodities.... By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
What the working man sells is not directly his Labor, but his Laboring Power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Law, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his laboring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.
KARL MARX, Value, Price, and Profit
The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we have to do is not to talk about his will, but to enquire about his power, the limits of that power, and the character of those limits.
KARL MARX, Value, Price, and Profit
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
KARL MARX, The Criticism of the Gotha Program
Under the ideal measure of values there lurks the hard cash.
Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things.
KARL MARX, Value, Price, and Profit
The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
KARL MARX, preface, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
A commodity has a value because it is a crystallization of social labor. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production.
KARL MARX, Value, Price, and Profit
Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being.
KARL MARX, Paris Manuscripts
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.
KARL MARX, Wage Labour and Capital
Language comes into being, like consciousness, from the basic need, from the scantiest intercourse with other human.
KARL MARX, The German Ideology
We cannot tell by looking at the diamond that it is a commodity. When it serves as a use-value, asthetic or mechanical, on the breast of a harlot, or in the hand of a glasscutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity.
KARL MARX, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
KARL MARX, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object.
KARL MARX, "Alienated Labor", Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Money is a crystal formed of necessity in the course of the exchanges.
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
KARL MARX, The German Ideology
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